Feminine Gospels

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The narrative begins with a mother fitting in paid domestic work at home to earn money to feed her baby, but then moves outwards to take on agricultural work (as in many developing countries), factory and industrial work, moving to the industrial revolution and urban settings and finally the modern age until, worn out, the woman dies. As the stanzas progress the numbers for whom the woman is responsible increase; her burden grows and grows. At the same time, her nurturing role never ceases. Themes: loss of control, loss of identity, suffering, society pressure altering women to fit into stereotypes

The short, stunted ‘Beauty is fame’ is followed by a caesura. Duffy emphasizes the brutality of this line. Helen did not ask for beauty, yet she is made into an icon that must be pursued due to the male gaze. They look upon her and whisper her name, spreading her name across the globe. The perusers kill her husband, ‘sliced a last grin in his throat’, male rage and jealousy destroying Helen’s life. The final image of this section focuses on ‘little bird inside a cage’, representing the trap that beauty is. Helen’s whole life was marred by the prosecution of men, trapped due to her physical features. The final image of a ‘cage’ symbolizes this oppression, Helen’s life is destroyed due to her beauty.

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In this poem Duffy makes no mention of the expectations of society and doesn’t explain how or why the woman decided to diet. It is enough that the consequences are described so vividly.

This is Duffy at her most serious - the poems are rich, beautiful and heart-rending in their exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and pain. These works are also her most formal - following in the tradition of Shakespeare and John Donne, Duffy’s contemporary love poems in this collection draw on the traditional sonnet and ballad forms.Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning Scottish poet who, according to Danette DiMarco in Mosaic,is the poet of “post-post war England: Thatcher’s England.” Duffy is best known for writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as an Economistreviewer described them, are typically “spoken in the voices of the urban disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the world.” Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph’s convent school, her early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her verses is someone whose gender is not specified. With her 1993 collection, Mean Time,and 1994’s Selected Poems, she would begin to also write about queer love. The oxymoronic ‘Tough beauty’ displays Cleopatra’s character perfectly. She is at once beautiful and impactful. She uses her beauty to gain leverage, being able to outsmart the men in her way. Anything that Caesar does, Cleopatra does the same or better, ‘matched him glass for glass’. Duffy dismantles the notion that women cannot perform equally to men, Cleopatra doing so despite being subjugated for her feminine beauty. Beautiful’ by Carol Ann Duffy moves through the lives of four women and shows how they were exploited. Bala, Ismail. "Woman-To-Woman: Displacement, Sexuality and Gender in Carol Ann Duffy's Poetry". Linguistic Association of Nigeria, vol 4, no. 2, 2011, Accessed 29 Apr 2018. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Duffy is also the United Kingdom’s poet laureate, the first woman to be appointed the position in 400 years. She was seriously considered for the position in 1999. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration had wanted a poet laureate who exemplified the new “Cool Britannia,” not an establishment figure, and Duffy was certainly anything but establishment. She is the Scottish-born lesbian daughter of two Glasgow working-class radicals. Her female partner is also a poet and the two of them are raising a child together. Duffy has a strong following among young Britons, partially because her poetry collection Mean Timewas included in Britain’s A-level curriculum, but Blair was worried about how “middle England” would react to a lesbian poet laureate. There were also concerns in the administration about what Britain’s notorious tabloids would write about her sexuality, and about comments that Duffy had made urging an updated role for the poet laureate. In the end, Blair opted for the safe choice and named Andrew Motion to the post.

When she wants to, Duffy can write with lyric intensity, noticing "where the lights from the shop ran like paint in the rain", observing a child's beauty in the glow under the skin of her hands, or watching the same child sleeping "with the whole moon held in your arms". Independent (London, England) October 2, 1999, Christina Patterson, "Street-wise Heroines at Home," p. WR9. Firstly, the consonance across ‘deep, dumped’ creates a sense of oppression, the language flowing in hypnotic circles. Furthermore, the plosive ‘p’ within both these words cuts through the narrative, representing the brutality Monroe experienced on a daily basis.Duffy alludes obliquely to significant events in history, and these will be unmistakable to readers. For example “the fisherman” is Christ. These final three stanzas explore the mystery of Helen, the perusers unsure of where she escaped. The use of ‘dusk’, ‘moon’, and ‘smuggled’ play into the semantics of secrecy, Helen slipping away from her followers’ grasps. Yet, even in this act, the male gaze focuses on how ‘her dress/clung to her form’. Duffy suggests that at all times the male gaze sexualizes women.